Fred Branfman writes…

As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be “good Germans,” unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people had said they had known and been horrified, but were afraid to speak up. But they would then be “weak or fearful or indifferent Germans,” not “good Germans.” The idea that only the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust made no sense. Whatever the Germans as a whole know about the concentration camps, they certainly knew about the systematic mistreatment of Jews that had occurred before their very eyes, and from which so many had profited. And if they were not really “good Germans,” what should or could they have done, given the reality of Nazi tyranny?

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Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Today, torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil. The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President Bush and our other leaders, but about ourselves. What are we, as citizens, as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a president, vice-president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, and attorney-general who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?

For most of my own life, from my earliest days, I have been somewhat fixated on the question of how societies could live with such duplicity and complicity with such barbarous crimes against humanity. Whether it be under the guise of fascism, or the even more historically murderous regimes of totalitarian Communism. I would judge these societies, and their complicit citizens harshly. I did so from my own safe vantage point of privilege living in the unspoken empire of the USA. I, as all thinking and conscious citizens must acknowledge, must now confront the banality of such complicity to evil that is festering in my own beloved country. Fred Branfman challenges his fellow countrymen and women with this essay, which pulls no punches and places the responsibility for the growing atrocities being committed in America’s name squarely at the feet of the so-called ‘conservative movement’ where it belongs.

It is not only disturbingly to the point, but contains personal anecdotes which are rather moving as well.

Read The Complete Essay